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- Title
BINAURAL CUE PRESERVATION IN NOISE REDUCTION ALGORITHMS FOR BINAURAL HEARING AIDS.
- Authors
Marquardt, Daniel; Doclo, Simon
- Abstract
In a binaural hearing aid system, the hearing-impaired person is fitted with two hearing aids where the microphone signals of both hearing aids are shared, principally improving the performance compared to a monaural or bilateral system. The objective of a binaural speech enhancement algorithm is not only to selectively extract the target speaker and to suppress background noise, but also to preserve the auditory impression of the acoustic scene. This can be achieved by preserving the binaural cues, i.e. the interaural time difference (ITD), the interaural level difference (ILD) and the interaural coherence (IC), of all sources. These binaural cues play a major role in spatial awareness, i.e. for source localization and for determining the spaciousness of auditory objects, and are very important for speech intelligibility due to binaural unmasking. For the binaural Minimum Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR) beamformer and the binaural Multi-channel Wiener filter (MWF) it has been shown that the binaural cues of the speech component are preserved but the binaural cues of the noise component are distorted, such that both components are perceived as coming from the speech direction, which is obviously undesired. To optimally benefit from binaural unmasking and to preserve the spatial impression, several extensions for the binaural MVDR beamformer and MWF have been recently proposed, which aim to also preserve the binaural cues of the residual noise component by including cue preservation terms in the binaural cost function. This presentation provides an overview of these extensions and presents the results of subjective listening experiments.
- Subjects
BINAURAL hearing aids; NOISE control; HEARING impaired; MICROPHONES; INTELLIGIBILITY of speech; WIENER filters (Signal processing)
- Publication
Journal of International Advanced Otology, 2015, Vol 11, p11
- ISSN
1308-7649
- Publication type
Article